What’s lurking in the unexplored deep? Liquid Breathing, Decompression Issues, & Alien Sea Life in James Cameron’s mysterious film The Abyss with marine geomicrobiologist Dr. Tina Treude

Unobtainium Podcast

In this episode of the Unobtainium Podcast, hosts Amy Mainzer and Adam Sigel explore the scientific realities behind James Cameron's 1989 fi

Key takeaways

• Liquid breathing using oxygenated fluorocarbon emulsions is scientifically feasible and has been tested in animals, though it remains impractical for humans due to viscosity and physiological challenges.
• Decompression sickness (the bends) occurs when dissolved gases like nitrogen form bubbles in the bloodstream during rapid ascent from depth, requiring slow decompression to prevent fatal outcomes.

Main topics

• Liquid breathing technology and its scientific basis
• Decompression sickness and decompression chambers

Notable quotes

"It's like opening a shaken soda bottle—when you come up too fast, gas bubbles form in your bloodstream."

"The real mystery isn't aliens—it's how much of our own planet we haven't explored yet."

Conclusion

While 'The Abyss' blends science fiction with real deep-sea challenges, it underscores a profound truth: Earth's

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hi, I'm Amy Meinzer, astrophysicist and professor of planetary science at UCLA. And Speaker 1 (0:05) I'm Adam Siegel, a writer and producer working on film and TV projects in Hollywood and internationally. And this is the Unobtainium Podcast, where Speaker 2 (0:13) we break down the science of some of our favorite films and TV shows. It Speaker 1 (0:16) was a lot of fun making this. Hope you enjoy it. Speaker 2 (0:19) What would you say is the weirdest thing you've seen underwater? Oh my God, what's the weirdest? Speaker 3 (0:27) Well, I think pyrosomes are the weirdest. What's Speaker 1 (0:31) a pyrosome? Speaker 3 (0:32) Pyrosomes, they are a colony of little salps. So they are astonishingly close relatives to us because they have like a pre-cordata. So they have like a pre-spine. Speaker 1 (0:47) It sounds like a Dr. Seuss character. What was the, the zelps? Speaker 3 (0:52) Zelps. They look like a cigar. Speaker 1 (0:55) Okay. Speaker 3 (0:56) We were diving in the Santa Barbara Basin and there were tons of them. Like, you know, some of them are like this size, others are the size you can like ride on them. I mean, those here, they're smaller. But they also, they glow in the dark, you know, in this fluorescent light. And so we suddenly, it looked like tons of like. cigars were hitting the submersible. Speaker 1 (1:16) You're in a rave with all the lights. A Speaker 3 (1:19) bunch of glow sticks all over the place. Speaker 2 (1:21) Glow Speaker 1 (1:21) sticks Speaker 2 (1:21) everywhere. Speaker 2 (1:26) Hi, I'm Amy, UCLA planetary scientist with my co-host Adam, a writer and producer. We love movies and science, and today we're going to talk about the movie The Abyss and exploring the deep ocean. I've been meaning to ask you what this thing is. Fluid breathing system. We just got them. We use it if we need to go really deep. How deep? It's classified. Anyway, you breathe liquid so you can't be compressed. Pressure Speaker 1 (1:49) doesn't Speaker 2 (1:50) get Speaker 1 (1:50) to you. You're saying you get liquid in your lungs? Speaker 2 (1:54) Oxygenated fluorocarbon emulsion. Speaker 1 (1:56) Bullshit. Speaker 2 (1:56) Check this out. Can I borrow your rat? Speaker 1 (1:58) Hey, what are you doing? You're gonna kill her. Oh man, you're just drowning her. Speaker 2 (2:03) He's gonna be fine. I've breathed this myself. She's gonna drown. Look, she's freaking out. He's going through a normal adjustment period. Speaker 1 (2:11) Does that look normal to you? He's Speaker 2 (2:12) taking the fluid into his lungs. There he goes. There's a bit of anxiety here. Now he's starting to relax. He's breathing fine. See his chest moving? He's got plenty of oxygen. Speaker 1 (2:20) Damn rat's breathing that. Speaker 2 (2:22) See, the fluid's harder to push in and out than air. It's a little more work to breathe. But he's doing fine. Look, he's digging it. Speaker 1 (2:29) She's doing it, not digging it. Now let her out. Now! Speaker 2 (2:32) Okay, all right. Now we let the fluid drain from his lungs. See? He's fine. Speaker 1 (2:36) It's a she. Speaker 2 (2:39) Hi, I'm Amy. And Speaker 1 (2:41) I'm Adam. And Speaker 2 (2:42) this is Unobtainium. Speaker 1 (2:43) And that was the scene, the explainer scene of the liquid breathing from the 1989 movie The Abyss by James Cameron. And Speaker 2 (2:53) today we have a fantastic guest to talk about everything under the waves with us. This is Professor Tina Troida. She's a professor with me at UCLA, and she's an expert in marine geomicrobiology. That's correct. Welcome, Tina. Hey, Tina. So, Tina, you've done a whole bunch of scuba diving as well as ROV operations. And submersibles. And submersibles. Did you like the movie, I guess, was the first question. No, I loved the movie. Speaker 3 (3:20) And James Cameron is also like an icon in the deep water science community. I consider him as like an engineering type. You know, he pushed a lot of the technology forward. And what I like about his movie is like he kind of shows you directly where. the cutoff happens between this is science and this is science fiction. And you see that in the abyss. For example, at the beginning, when they get into the station or, you know, when Lindsay comes down, you know, they do the compression first. And then they say that, you know, when we come back up again, we have to do actually like a three-week decompression time in a chamber before they can go back out. Speaker 1 (4:00) Oh, it's three weeks in a chamber. Yeah. These Speaker 2 (4:02) are Speaker 3 (4:03) super long decompression. I mean, should we take a step back and talk about decompression? Sure. Yeah. Yes. You know, so what happens basically is under higher pressure, gases dissolve better in liquids. And so that happens with the gases you breathe. And so, you know, the oxygen has its own problem because under too high pressure, it becomes toxic, mainly because of all the radical it has that can damage like your membrane and stuff like that. But nitrogen, you know, it doesn't really. interact with your metabolism, but it dissolves in your bloodstream. And then if you come up too quickly, it's like opening, you know, if you have like a gas water bottle and, you know, you shake it up a little bit, you open it, you know, you get all the gas out like very quickly. And so imagine like if you dive deep, you get saturated with more nitrogen in your bloodstream. And then if you come up too fast, it's like this, you know. water bottle, your mineral water bottle, like you get a lot of gas bubbles and that can clock in your nervous system, you know, it, you, it, We call it the bends, you know, because when the gas bubbles form in your bloodstream, it can like block connections to your nervous system. Super painful and can be Speaker 2 (5:17) fatal. Yeah, absolutely fatal. So the counteraction to that is to do decompression. In Speaker 1 (5:23) a chamber that does what? What's the... Speaker 2 (5:25) Well, there's, okay, so there's different levels. I mean, you know, just for recreational scuba divers, we have a table or we have a computer that just basically says, okay, if you're down this deep for this long with this mix of gas, this is how long you need to stay. stay underwater at, let's say, maybe, I don't know, three meters below the surface for, you know, X number of minutes. And we in recreational diving don't do decompression diving. In other words, we don't have to, if we had to go to the surface right away, we could safely. But this is different. This is technical diving. This is, in this case, now they need weeks. to let this gas bubble sort of diffuse out of their bloodstream. Right. Yeah. So Speaker 3 (6:02) basically they're reducing the pressure very, very slowly so that it doesn't create any bubbles in your body. Speaker 1 (6:09) Which is where the danger is, the health danger. Is there a factor of the speed in which you descend? So if you go down too fast? Speaker 3 (6:18) Going down is not that much of a problem, aside from that you have to depressurize your, like, little connection between your ear and your nose, you know, that's why we like blow our nose. Like on an Speaker 1 (6:29) airplane, you get like that pain. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 3 (6:31) You have to, yeah, your ears can't. I would say that is like the thing you have to do when you go fast, deep. But it's in that moment, the gases just dissolve into your system. So it's not that much of a problem. I mean, except for this. Other thing when you go really deep, which we have like a high pressure nervous syndrome, which we also see in the movie. Speaker 1 (6:53) If Speaker 3 (6:53) you stay at shallow depth for just a short time, you might not need to decompression at all. It's not much of a problem. But it's the deeper you go. The deeper you go or the longer you stay. You can even when you dive 10 meters, you might need to have to do decompression if you stay like. Many hours. Hours. Speaker 1 (7:10) With any James Cameron movie, there's a lot of science always. There's the alien. There's all the other stuff. But let's start with the fluid breathing. What is that? Is that even possible? I Speaker 3 (7:23) love the question because actually it inspired me as well. When I was an undergrad back then, I already knew I wanted to become an oceanographer. I saw the movie and I was immediately thinking like, what? this is real. You know, James Cameron also mentioned it himself that this experiment with the rat was actually real in the movie. Speaker 1 (7:45) They actually did it in the movie. Yeah, and Speaker 3 (7:47) he was inspired, I think, in the late 60s when he saw, like, you know, someone demonstrating that with, like, some selling solution and then it got later, like, more... sophisticated with this chlorofluor stuff and technically yes I mean it has a lot of oxygen it can dissolve a lot of oxygen and also co2 which is important right because you want to get the oxygen in and into your body you want to get the co2 oh so it absorbed Speaker 1 (8:15) the co2 it would also absorb Speaker 3 (8:17) the co2 yeah but the problem is the viscosity so and you see in the movie you see the rat like yeah Speaker 1 (8:24) They say that it's harder because you have to take it. Yeah, because it's a fluid now. Speaker 2 (8:28) Instead of the viscosity of air, which is, you know, just practically nothing, it's now liquid. And you've got to move this in and out of your lungs. Just seems like a lot more work. But I guess there was one line in the movie that I thought was really interesting, which is, you know, for nine months, we all breathe fluid. I was thinking that too. So Speaker 1 (8:45) is that kind of meant to be the same thing, the amnio fluid? Speaker 3 (8:48) So this thing never happened with humans, really. No, no, no. Speaker 2 (8:54) Sorry, I busted it. Speaker 3 (8:56) I mean, it's an interesting thought, but the problem is really to get the CO2 out in the end. And with the viscosity, you know, you can maybe do it for a moment, but for long term, you have the problem that you cannot keep up with. the amount you would have to get in and out. Long-term, particularly, you know, with, you know, your brain needs a lot of oxygen. You don't want to get too much CO2 in your system as well. And that seems to be the limitation. Speaker 2 (9:20) It's just we can't cope with getting the CO2 out, diffused out of the body, into the fluid and then back out. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Speaker 1 (9:27) When I did write a project once where I was looking at, and you know this because you scuba dive, like how deep a human can normally go submerged underwater. And what is the normal amount? It's really only like 100 meters or something? Speaker 3 (9:41) I mean, it depends on what you want to accept happens to you. But usually you say like 40 meters. I don't know what is in feet. That's about 120 feet. Yeah, Speaker 2 (9:53) roughly Speaker 3 (9:53) 120 feet. I'm still somehow in the metric system. As most scientists are. But that's usually when you get the first signs of N2 becoming like... It's Speaker 1 (10:05) N2 or the nitrogen. Speaker 3 (10:07) So explain that. So it's basically that a nitrogen, you know, what is mostly in our air that we breathe, it becomes like a narcotic under pressure. It interferes with your like synapses and your nervous system. And so, you know, you put. respond differently to it. It's different from the high pressure syndrome that we also see in the movie happening. So it's more like a narcotic effect. It puts you on a little funny feeling and you might not be able to, you might like it down there and you don't want to come up. So that's the danger of it. You underestimate your situation. It's Speaker 1 (10:51) a Speaker 3 (10:51) Odysseus, right? He keeps Speaker 1 (10:52) getting, you know, has to stay at the island because he keeps eating the lotus. Speaker 3 (10:57) Yeah, it is sort of the lotus of the deep. I actually had that experience